Control Plane Network Function Architecture

Control plane (CP) NFs are designed around a three-tiered architecture that take advantage of the stateful or stateless capabilities that are afforded within cloud native environments.

The architectural tiers are as follows:

  • Protocol Load Balancer Services—These are stateless microservices that are primarily responsible for dynamic discovery of application containers as well as for protocol proxy and termination. These include traditional 3GPP protocols and new protocols that are introduced with 5G.

  • Applications Services—Responsible for implementing the core application or business logic, these are the stateless services that render the actual application based on the received information. This layer may contain varying degrees of microservice granularity. Application services are stateless.

  • State management services—Enable stateless application services by providing a common data layer (CDL) to store or cache state information (for example session and subscriber data). This layer supports various data storage technologies from in-memory caches to full-fledge databases.

Control Plan Network Function Tiered Architecture

The three-tiered architecture on which Cisco CP NFs are designed fully support the 5G core (5GC) Service-based Architecture (SBA) defined by 3GPP. These NFs communicate with each other and with third-party NFs over the Service-based Interface (SBI) using HTTP/2 over TCP as defined by 3GPP.

Cisco CP NF Service-based Architecture Support

For more information on the Cisco network functions, see their corresponding network function documentation.